Good morning everyone, my name is Nelson, but you all know me as PizzaPirate.

The end of the year is very close, I started writing this article in a Starbucks in Shinjuku on December 26th at 10am, then moved to a Starbucks in Shibuya at 5pm, then continued on December 27th in Shimokitazawa at 6pm, now I'm in Kita-Sando to re-read the article and publish it on December 31st in Shibuya.

I decided to write this article because I spent an intense year in the world of NFTs and wanted to explain why you can find my pieces dated 2018 and other ones almost everywhere in the various 3.0 marketplaces.

I am trying to remember in detail everything that happened to me, but I'll try to do my best to tell you about my adventure! YARR!

Here are the contents in order of appearance:

• 2018 - Selling JPGs where?

• 2019/2020 - The deeeeeeep nothing.

• 2021 - The madness of NFTs and a loss.

• 2022 - Having fun in the community and becoming a collector.

• The future.

This text was written in English by an Italian, and I re-read it several times, so there will be some errors. Excuse me.

At the end of 2018, around September, I received an email from Ryoma Ito about a project they are doing, the possibility of selling my creations in a digital marketplace via blockchain.

I didn't know anything about blockchain, and he briefly explained that I could publish my works in different editions.

I asked how much I had to pay to publish on the blockchain, and they reassured me that they would pay for the publication and give me a wallet.

So on October 15th, I published several of my works on Makersplace.

This is my first NFT, but I had no idea what an NFT was or what I was getting into. I've always been interested in technology in general, but blockchains always made me think about scams and finance, as soon as I discovered that it could be connected to my art, I decided to test the waters.

One thing I've always liked about NFTs, which has become my primary motivation, is that being a digital artist, any work I print, I don't consider an original because it's a printer who is designing my piece. I've done some physical work in my life, I've drawn on shoes and T-shirts, I've done murals and those are the original PizzaPirates. But everything else I print, like my sticker packs, are not originals.

However, I only created a few NFTs on makersplace, only 7 NFTs, I took this digital world lightly, and by the end of December 2018, I stopped posting stuff and received no offers.

In these two years, I didn't do anything in the blockchain, I kept creating art on Instagram. Among the most important things, I did an event for VANS and a Christmas Showcase. In practice, I improved my line, but above all, I began to be interested in drawing pin-up girls.

I start getting offers for my pieces on makersplace, not just for one but for several pieces. This made me start researching what was happening again, and I discovered the gold rush of NFTs.

But there was many different marketplaces, some closed, some by invitation, and some that I don't know how they worked. Precisely because I knew very little about this world, I began experimenting with various places without knowing how things worked. In fact, you can find only one piece on rarible, this one here:

https://rarible.com/token/0x60f80121c31a0d46b5279700f9df786054aa5ee5:281197?tab=overview

In the same period, given the GAS at an exorbitant price, I also tried showtime.

And lastly, I was testing opensea, in fact, you can find some works there too in a dedicated collection.

It was difficult to find guides or information on what was best to do, everything seemed like a scam, and I wanted to understand how this world worked. I spent money and time to understand.

Out of all the marketplaces, Foundation was the most popular because of the decent UI or the hype behind receiving an invitation to publish on it. I had never really used discord until now, mainly for a few calls while playing video games. I have to be honest and say that I spent a fierce month on different discords to be able to receive an invitation, in the meantime I took the opportunity to prepare my first 1/1, after three weeks thanks to an artist I met on the official Foundation server I received the invitation.

On April 5th, I published my first work on Foundation, which still needs a collector. It is one of the works that show my beginning in drawing pin-up girls, especially in color. I've always been scared of color and seeing how PizzaPirate was doing so well in black and white, I was unsure about breaking one of the rules I had imposed on myself and by which they knew me (at that time I had reached 11k followers on IG). In fact, I started working with grayscale, but to better express myself, I wanted to use color, I wanted to do something different that interested me. The style I'm using now is the one I enjoy, even if I'm thinking about changing again.

My mother died. I froze from everything. I could barely keep working and try to distract myself from the mourning I still feel today.

In October, to restart my life and not throw myself away, I started going to the gym and purely on the advice of my best friend, I started drawing waifus, just for fun and to learn some anatomy.

I published these first works in this new style on Foundation by pure chance, I was having a lot of fun, and out of nowhere, without knowing anything, I found my first collector, Robek, aka RWX, I didn't know anything about who he was and how influential he was in the NFT anime community. But it gave me so much energy and positivity that fueled my creativity at 110%. I wouldn’t be here in the space without him, i’ll always be grateful for his bids and the ethics that taught me with his words and actions.

Just seeing this new "meta" anime on Foundation, I tried to look for a discord focused on that, and on October 18th, I entered ANIFam;

Here I found so many people mainly interested in having fun and designing beautiful things, all the other discords with the NFT theme only had earnings as an interest.
So either you created value or were nobody, in ANIFam, the anime connected us and in the meantime, we drew, watched movies or collected Waifu in our beloved Waifu-Hell.

I'm still active on the server, and I keep chatting on Twitter with the friends I made there.

I also found that provenance is everything in this space, with so many scammers you need to prove yourself every day, and I made some mistakes too, that’s why I’m writing this article as a journal, so anyone can read what I did till now.

The best thing about December wasn't Christmas or New Year's, but the desire to give everyone your own drawings, a new meta began, giving away your stamp for Christmas, so i received free art from a lot of excellent artists! You could see that we all did it for fun and because we cared for each other. In addition, we did the great secret Santa of ANIfam discord. This was a significant period that brought me a lot of happiness.

My resolutions for this year as an artist were to release one work a month, so I could take my time and make good art. In this period, it started the meta of stamps for bidders at auctions. I continued until April, but on the anniversary of my mother's death, I stopped again.

I practically didn't create anything. But I focused a lot on collecting art on Tezos and discovered many artists creating beautiful art.

This year on Tezos, I collected 246 pieces by spending 400 Tezos. And I will spend the same amount next year, every month I spend a specific amount on tezos. It's an excellent platform to build a following and meet other artists.

I was lucky enough to be a curator for three days on Teia.Art You can see everything I've collected here

The heat and the sadness made me pass this period slowly.

With some recovered energy, I wanted to experiment with pixel art, but I didn't want to publish it in my foundation collection since I was learning and I didn't want to ruin it with the difference in style. So after spending months shooting for Tezos, I decided to create it here, Rarity Waifus was born!

The concept is straightforward, to create anime versions of weapons with different rarities, typical of video games, besides that if a person collected the four rarities, he would receive the rarest version for free! SSR-Chan!

The first season went very well for a small collection, I was also lucky enough to collaborate with MACO.

I plan to collaborate more and release season 2 by the end of January!

The last thing in November, I started collecting art on Solana as well.

This month has been incredible, the support I have received from the whole community has been fabulous, I will never be used to receiving so much help.

I basically sold all my pieces from this and last year on Foundation, this makes me want to start releasing new pieces again and try to release once a month again.

This month was also the meta for open editions, like last year, the artists created pieces especially for the holidays, only this time, instead of sweating and passing wallets and manually sending each edition, they used manifold.

I've collected many pieces from artists I usually can't support.

My piece is a remastered version of SSR-Chan, you can find it here until the end of the holidays.

I also had to create contracts, therefore collections, on manifolds before January 2nd due to problems with OpenSea.

I don't know if I'll use them all, but I didn't want to regret it later.

Congratulations! You have reached the end of my adventure…for now! That's why I'll list spoilers about what I want to do and try:

• Apparel connected to Rarity Waifus.

• Try making a Gacha Machine using DokiDoki DeGacha.

• Develop resin toys.

• Release pizza slices via free open editions and not manually.

• Being able to collaborate more with other friends.

To sum up, this year has been full and packed, I've met many people, and I've done less than I wanted.

But I've managed to keep one important thing, health, I've managed to hit the gym a whole year, something I've never done in my life, and I see results, both physically and mentally, if you want one piece of advice from me, stay healthy.

Of course, I've made more trips than in the last few years, but I used to travel for work at least once a month.

I have reconnected long-lost friendships.

I have had a podcast for almost three years now.

All this with work, I could do more creatively if I didn't have my work in between, but I like it, and I’m good at it, so I don't want to lose it.

Thank you for reading this far. Let me know what you think on Twitter!

Happy start of 2023! Let’s keep haveing fun together!

PizzaPirate Nelson